We're a small and friendly team operating within Walmart; we're focused on delivering great value to Walmart's customers, as well as our internal clients. Members of the team are self-motivating, curious, and have a hands-on attitude, and take pride in their work and accomplishments. We use the Clojure programming language, almost exclusively, to ensure that our servers are fast and very stable; we use GraphQL and good old-fashioned conversation to keep our internal clients informed, engaged, and productive.
Our team's primary mission is giving customers access to their online and in-store purchase history; this includes receiving and storing a constant feed of receipt information from thousands of Walmart and Sam's Club stores.
Our daily cycle includes a brief "standup" meeting to ask questions, check on progress, call out interesting problems and solutions, and otherwise keep in touch. We try to keep the rest of the day free from meetings, to actually get things done.
Because we are, and always have been, a remote-first team, we rely on good communication: both in writing, and via video.
We have full ownership of, and responsibility for, the life-cycle of our code, and the servers that code runs on, as well as monitoring tools. We deploy on a daily basis, and we continually work to improve our DevOps tools and processes.
Our systems sit between front-end developers building web pages and mobile apps, and other back-end teams and their APIs; an important part of the job is working out the best solutions that address the needs of both sides, then implementing those solutions with a focus on stability and scalability. We expect you to have a good intuition for building systems that meet our clients' needs but won't fail under pressure.
Candidates should be able to demonstrate the ability to think and work in Clojure.
We're a small and friendly team operating within Walmart; we're focused on delivering great value to Walmart's customers, as well as our internal clients. Members of the team are self-motivating, curious, and have a hands-on attitude, and take pride in their work and accomplishments. We use the Clojure programming language, almost exclusively, to ensure that our servers are fast and very stable; we use GraphQL and good old-fashioned conversation to keep our internal clients informed, engaged, and productive.
Our team's primary mission is giving customers access to their online and in-store purchase history; this includes receiving and storing a constant feed of receipt information from thousands of Walmart and Sam's Club stores.
Our daily cycle includes a brief "standup" meeting to ask questions, check on progress, call out interesting problems and solutions, and otherwise keep in touch. We try to keep the rest of the day free from meetings, to actually get things done.
Because we are, and always have been, a remote-first team, we rely on good communication: both in writing, and via video.
We have full ownership of, and responsibility for, the life-cycle of our code, and the servers that code runs on, as well as monitoring tools. We deploy on a daily basis, and we continually work to improve our DevOps tools and processes.
Our systems sit between front-end developers building web pages and mobile apps, and other back-end teams and their APIs; an important part of the job is working out the best solutions that address the needs of both sides, then implementing those solutions with a focus on stability and scalability. We expect you to have a good intuition for building systems that meet our clients' needs but won't fail under pressure.
Candidates should be able to demonstrate the ability to think and work in Clojure.
We're a small close-knit team backed by big company resources. We write mission-critical, robust software that's used by millions of Walmart's customers daily.
Our suite of software includes but is certainly not limited to:
- a large distributed system that processes all store transactions from every Walmart and Sam's Club store in the US. If you've ever used Walmart Pay, this is how you get your electronic receipt!
- a massive GraphQL service that powers all customer purchase & returns history for all platforms (written using our own open-source GraphQL implementation for Clojure: https://github.com/walmartlabs/lacinia). We roll out new marquee customer-facing features in this service almost weekly: everything from tire installation services to bakery orders to propane tanks.
- services to allow customers to manage and purchase care plans
- transactional push notifications
Our tech stack is: Clojure (for everything!), GraphQL, Cassandra, Kafka, Elasticsearch, Redis, Prometheus, Ruby (for some infrastructure tasks)
Here's a few things we value that you should have:
- A self-starter, self-accountable, curious, and DIY attitude. A lot of our bedrock technology is home-grown and written to solve our own unique Walmart-scale problems. One of the engineers on our team wrote an entire Clojure dialect (https://github.com/candid82/joker/), and scripts written in that language now do a lot of heavy lifting of our own infrastructure.
- A good intuition for writing code that won't fall over under pressure and handles failure states well. We deploy daily and a null pointer might impact millions of requests in a few minutes.
- An interest in doing DevOps-y stuff and a high expectation in good monitoring. We have full ownership of the life-cycle of our code and the servers it runs on.
- The ability to think and work in functional languages (Clojure)
- Experience writing distributed systems with a lot of message passing
We've got a unique holiday shopping season coming up, and we'd love to have you join the team. If this sounds like a good fit for you, please send me an email: bcarrell@walmart.com
Heh, I'm likewise the author of a newer Clojure dialect, Clojure RS (https://github.com/clojure-rs/ClojureRS), would that be enough to get considered? I'd love the job just to work with candid82 alone :)
(Also, I was linked here from reddit -- I've never used hackernews mostly, I have no idea if I'm posting this response in the right spot)
WalmartLabs | Software Engineering (Clojure) | SF or REMOTE | FULL TIME
We're a small close-knit team backed by big company resources. We write mission-critical, robust software that's used by millions of Walmart's customers daily.
Our suite of software includes but is certainly not limited to:
- a large distributed system that processes all store transactions from every Walmart and Sam's Club store in the US. If you've ever used Walmart Pay, this is how you get your receipt!
- a massive GraphQL service that powers all customer purchase & returns history for all platforms (written using our own open-source GraphQL implementation for Clojure: https://github.com/walmartlabs/lacinia). We roll out new marquee customer-facing features in this service almost weekly: everything from tire installation services to bakery orders to propane tanks.
- services to allow customers to manage and purchase care plans
- push notifications
Our tech stack is: Clojure (for everything!), GraphQL, Cassandra, Kafka, Redis, Prometheus, Ruby (for some infrastructure tasks)
Here's a few things we value that you should have:
- A self-starter, curious, and DIY attitude. A lot of our bedrock technology is home-grown and written to solve our own unique Walmart-scale problems. One of the engineers on our team wrote an entire Clojure dialect (https://github.com/candid82/joker/), and scripts written in that language now do a lot of heavy lifting of our own infrastructure.
- A good intuition for writing code that won't fall over under pressure and handles failure states well. We deploy daily and a null pointer might impact millions of requests in a few minutes.
- An interest in doing DevOps-y stuff and a high expectation in good monitoring. We have full ownership of the life-cycle of our code and the servers it runs on.
- The ability to think and work in functional languages (Clojure)
- Experience writing distributed systems with a lot of message passing
If this sounds interesting to you, please reach out to bcarrell@walmart.com and say hello.
When you freeze, they give you a PIN to unlock it. You can't unfreeze with just your hacked data alone. Of course, the PIN is probably in the next column over, so...
I don't know if it's still the case, but Virginia used to your SSN as an ID. There was an opt-out for that, which I exercised about 25-30 years ago, so I don't know if that policy is still in place.
I own a home built in the 1960s in the northeast US. My home (like many others, I'm sure) uses an oil-fired boiler to provide heating and hot water. I don't have gas lines to my house. The gas company won't run them unless I pay ~$5,000 for them to do so. Even if my home used natural gas instead of oil, I feel like it's not really solving the problem.
What are my options here? Is solar viable? What can _I_ reasonably do to improve consumption? I use only LED lighting, eat meat rarely, use a programmable thermostat, have new windows/doors, etc. Improving the situation seems either not economically viable for most people or an incremental improvement. Just wait?
Take a hard look at the numbers. For example, livestock are responsible for 3.1% of US co2 equivalent warming (Wikipedia citing the US EPA), so going from average meat consumption to no meat consumption isn't a huge impact, but it's something.
$5k is about a dollar a day for 13 years; switching to natural gas is about 25% more efficient than fuel oil, co2-wise. Depending on how much heating you need that 25% could be vastly more impactful than a life without meat. Also, look into electric heating, depending on your electric supply that could be vastly more carbon efficient.
Also, around the house efficiency in the form of insulation and modern appliances is something that's usually super cost effective and carbon effective on a house from the 60s. It again will require up-front capital but is almost always a super smart move to do as soon as possible.
In some ways it's easier to be super self sacrificial and not eat meat, but it's important to look at the big picture. It really is about the numbers here; personal purity does nobody any good. Except on the political side; become a vocal single issue voter and never vote for a politician that doesn't have climate change part of their platform, and the same goes for political parties. Ultimately putting in mile carbon taxes will shift the market to do the right thing, but the politics make this impossible. Yes anti-economical too, negative externalities must be addressed by societal means, just like liabilities must be addressed through societal means.
> livestock are responsible for 3.1% of US co2 equivalent warming (Wikipedia citing the US EPA)
The same Wikipedia article also mentions FAO studies giving 14.5% and 18% globally. I wonder what explains the difference. Methodology? Ignoring the contribution of imports? Much higher emissions in the US compared to the world in other areas reducing the relative but not the absolute impact of livestock?
In any case meat and animal products seem very relevant to GHG emissions worldwide, and they might be in the US once you reduce other waste. But it's indeed a good idea to focus on the major contributors and low-hanging fruits first.
Sorry, 5k to run the lines, and I'm guessing another 5k to remove the oil tank and install new equipment. Roughly 10k for me to switch from oil to gas. Mentioned my insulation situation in other comments. Thanks!
We already give pretty good indications on how much carbon something is producing based on the power/oil bill. If you act to reduce your total outgoings, you're probably heading in the right direction.
Add insulation. If your house was built in 1960, was it retrofitted with wall insulation? Put more into the ceiling.
Depending on how much space you have, you can de-carbon your heat generation. Investigate heat pumps (ground loop for up there) for both hot air and hot water.
Solar hot water might be viable. In the US, the tax breaks make solar power a gimme if you have the money.
Stop watering the lawn, and install rain water tanks for any gardens you have.
As appliances die, replace them with more energy efficient ones. A small full fridge is more efficient than a large empty one. Beer and wine fridges should be gotten rid of.
Then, try to convert peak load to base load. Shift to a demand pricing tariff at your power company (where the price changes by time of day), and then try to lower your bill by changing when you do things.
Then we get into transport reduction, which is another whole kettle of fish.
> Add insulation. If your house was built in 1960, was it retrofitted with wall insulation? Put more into the ceiling.
Walls were stripped to the studs approx. 8-10 years ago and new fiberglass insulation installed at that point. Attic has (rough) batt insulation, but I suspect it could be better there. Air handler for the air conditioning system is also in the attic due to, I suspect, no other viable option for the design. Probably some loss there.
> Investigate heat pumps (ground loop for up there) for both hot air and hot water. Solar hot water might be viable. In the US, the tax breaks make solar power a gimme if you have the money.
I'll take a look, thanks. I'll note that I have ductwork for the air conditioning system but the (separate) heating system uses baseboard. Unfortunately, the finished basement doesn't have ductwork installed.
You may find some cheap, easy gains by adding thermostatically controlled fans to your attic's soffet vents. It can get very hot in an attic on hot, sunny days, even if the floors below are held in comfort by A/C. Forcing the (hot but not nearly as hot as attic air) fresh outside air in (especially during the cool night, then idling during the day) can reduce the work your A/C has to do.
Incremental improvements are the only way. Only you can make the decision as to what's viable for you. How's your insulation? Political engagement matters too: is there anything you'd like to lobby for or against?
I declared solar PV viable for me in Scotland at 56N, due to the available feed-in tariffs, and it's working pretty well. House not so old but the gas heating bill is unpleasantly high.
Don't overlook transport in global warming, it's not just about the house.
Better insulation was missing from your list (or was maybe part of "etc") but if you want a more efficient heating / cooling system ground source heat pumps are an option. They can run from the grid more efficiently than most other sources of heating or cooling or optionally be combined with solar.
> My personal dream endgame would be a dynamic language, such as Python or Ruby, that includes the concurrency features such as goroutines and channels. Directly as language features.
Clojure is dynamic and has goroutine and channel constructs through core.async.
We're a small and friendly team operating within Walmart; we're focused on delivering great value to Walmart's customers, as well as our internal clients. Members of the team are self-motivating, curious, and have a hands-on attitude, and take pride in their work and accomplishments. We use the Clojure programming language, almost exclusively, to ensure that our servers are fast and very stable; we use GraphQL and good old-fashioned conversation to keep our internal clients informed, engaged, and productive.
Our team's primary mission is giving customers access to their online and in-store purchase history; this includes receiving and storing a constant feed of receipt information from thousands of Walmart and Sam's Club stores.
Our daily cycle includes a brief "standup" meeting to ask questions, check on progress, call out interesting problems and solutions, and otherwise keep in touch. We try to keep the rest of the day free from meetings, to actually get things done.
Because we are, and always have been, a remote-first team, we rely on good communication: both in writing, and via video.
We have full ownership of, and responsibility for, the life-cycle of our code, and the servers that code runs on, as well as monitoring tools. We deploy on a daily basis, and we continually work to improve our DevOps tools and processes.
Our systems sit between front-end developers building web pages and mobile apps, and other back-end teams and their APIs; an important part of the job is working out the best solutions that address the needs of both sides, then implementing those solutions with a focus on stability and scalability. We expect you to have a good intuition for building systems that meet our clients' needs but won't fail under pressure.
Candidates should be able to demonstrate the ability to think and work in Clojure.
Skills list / technical stack: Clojure, GraphQL, Cassandra, Kafka, Elasticsearch, Redis, Prometheus, Ruby, Ansible, Spark, Docker, JVM
If this sounds good, please apply through our LinkedIn post https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/2403594484/?capColoOverri... (preferred) or email me at bcarrell@walmart.com.